Via John Schwenkler, Peter Hitchens makes an argument very similar to the one John and I have been making over the last few days. The core moral judgement of the conflict seems very similar:

Terrorist attacks on Israel are indeed revolting and indefensible. But the bombing of densely populated areas, however accurate, is certain to cause the deaths of many innocents.

How then can it be defended? In what important way is it different from Arab murders of Israeli women and children?

One is directly deliberate. The other is accidental but unavoidable. I wouldn’t say that was a specially important distinction, especially if you are a victim of it.

This is rather more remarkable because, as he did in his opposition to the war in Iraq, he has taken this position “as a consistent hard-line supporter of the Jewish state.” Mr. Hitchens is not alone in being a pro-Israel “hard-liner” opposed from the beginning to the invasion of Iraq and the strikes in Gaza, but his combination of views is still fairly rare in Britain and almost unheard of in the United States.

It does prompt me to wonder what exactly is required to be a “consistent hard-line supporter of the Jewish state” when one (correctly!) rejects the policies espoused by most other hard-line supporters. This does not seem to me to be as difficult to pin down as defining who is and is not a conservative. Provided that one does not start with policy positions and work backward, conservatives might acknowledge that their persuasion allows for at least some areas of disagreement on public policy. To be a self-described “consistent hard-line supporter” of a particular state is even more specific than saying that one is a strong supporter, because the label hard-liner implies that there are other, genuine supporters who are nonetheless soft, naive, wobbly, squishy and so forth.

Hard-line usually implies not only a certain temperamental implacability and refusal to compromise, but it often also refers to the perceived severity of policies being supported. Consequently, hard-liner is rarely a name that one self-applies; it is more often used pejoratively and dismissively in the same way that people use the words extremist, fringe or theocrat. Even though Mr. Hitchens uses it here to drive home that he believes the Gaza operation to be so foolish that even he, the hard-liner, opposes it, it is all the more strange to see label used here. He is making clear in his argument that he is not, in fact, consistently hard-line, but happens to agree with the position that is also held by “the usual anti-Israel factions and their gullible supporters,” which opens up the possibility that at least some of the “anti-Israel factions” and “gullible supporters,” so called, may not necessarily be so blinkered and confused as previously thought. (It is hard to tell, as it is not entirely clear who is to be included among “the usual anti-Israel factions.”)

This is a good thing, but it then prompts other questions: if someone as “hard-line” pro-Israel as Hitchens is opposing and even criticizing the strikes in Gaza in terms that are virtually indistinguishable from, say, my criticisms, what separates the pro-Israel hard-liner from the person who criticizes Israeli government actions because they are wrong and because they are manifestly counter-productive and injurious to Israeli security? People would laugh if I were to describe myself in the same way that Hitchens does, but in reality how do we actually differ on policy?

This is not, I think, merely a matter of semantics, but gets at a deeper problem with how we discuss public policy. We could consider the same problem with the troubling use of adjectives pro- and anti-American. Obviously, there are some people who are genuinely, utterly anti-American as such, just as there really are people who are consciously, vehemently anti-Israel, but just as “pro-Israel” has gradually narrowed in meaning until it is difficult to distinguish from maximally hawkish policy views “anti-American” has come to mean any serious or thorough criticism of the exercise of U.S. power no matter its source or expression. Even though opposing hegemony and unnecessary foreign wars is eminently patriotic, we are all too familiar with critics of hegemony and unnecessary foreign wars being accused of hating their country and wishing it ill.